Five Vices
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: Five drabbles of five hundred words about five vices of Charlie Davis


A/N I wrote this all in one sitting so please forgive any errors. Unbeta-d, all mistakes are my own. Warnings: aggressive child discipline, child abuse, obsession, mild sexual references.

1\. Running

For just about as long as he can remember, Charlie has loved to run. The rhythmic thump thump thump of his feet on the pavement were cathartic, practically meditative to him. In school, he won awards for running. Running the fastest, running the longest, completing the most laps. Each of them decorated the mantlepiece of their shabby home, each polished to shine by tiny hands.

He was also quite good at running away from his problems. During his brief engagement in his early twenties, he would take long runs in the morning and in the evening to avoid having to see the woman he was supposedly pledging his life to. On the wedding day, he got to the church, saw her at the aisle, turned around and ran around the outside of the pews and took off into the street.

He runs in Ballarat, ten years later. He runs in the morning, counting the thump thump thump of his footsteps, ten to the end of the driveway, twenty-five to the end of the street, another thirty to the phone box. It will take him approximately seventy (sixty-five with leeway) to escape the immediate vicinity of Doctor Blake and into the space between Mycroft street and town where Reality is kind of hazy.

He runs away from the death of his father, and if Ballarat hadn't materialized, then he would have run somewhere else. If he was running from the grief over the death, of the grief of his ignorance in believing his father to be a good cop he doesn't know. He has a head full of rules and restrictions upon his person, if he must behave like this, then so should everyone else. He runs in the evening, shaving second after second off his time. Starting later and later, challenging himself to make it back to the boarding house on time. When he gets locked out, he climbed in through an open window.

He ran away from Ballarat as well. He can't look at Rose Anderson without thinking about all the what ifs and what could have beens. He can't look at Matthew Lawson without feeling like he's suffocating in guilt, he can't look at Lucien and Jean without feeling jealousy. He can't look away, either, Ned Simmons is burned onto the back of his eyelids and when he sleeps, his mind can only conjure up unsettling mishmashes of worry and fear.

He never lost a real race before Jack Beazley. Perhaps he shouldn't count it because it was technically cheating. Or not, no one stopped in when they saw it. A pattern of things to come in Ballarat, though he doesn't know it yet. He pushes himself harder, running the track week in and week out until he's shaved more than five minutes off his original time. He runs until he has to puke in the bushes, his eyes are wet, until every muscle in his legs cries out for mercy.

He fled Ballarat by the end of the month.

2\. Smoking.

The big building Charlie grew up in was dilapidated, such was the cause of a family like Charlie's being able to rent a home there. He knows nothing about the gothic and it's relation to the otherworldly, but as a youth, he was of the belief that his older neighbour for who he did errands for a few pence was a vampire. An examination of the apartment did not reveal hapless victims, the cold shelf stocked was not with a punch bowl of blood, and the bedroom did not reveal a coffin. But it did deliver a whole other lifeline. A half-smoked cigarette case that he tucked into his threadbare jacket and escaped with.

His mother didn't like it when he smoked in the house because it reminded her of his father who chain-smoked something fierce. She didn't want him to smoke at all, because she feared him becoming beholden to them and wasting any of the scant money he had on something he didn't require. In a rare act of teenage rebellion, Charlie does not quit, instead, he escapes to the front fence and sat in front of the brickwork where she could not see him and smoked for as long as he could before he either froze or melted.

Matthew Lawson liked an occasional smoke, and he doesn't mind if Charlie joins him. He likes Matthew Lawson a lot, he is undemanding in company and doesn't mind Charlie's lack of proficiency in the art of small talk. These meetings progress to sitting together in the empty Pig and Whistle. Charlie smokes, Matthew drinks, each man involved in his own private vice and enjoying the company of the other.

He's not a heavy smoker, not a heavy as his father or really anyone else he knows. This is on account of his being poor more than anything else, but it's probably a good thing because when he moves into the Blake house, Jean is very clear about how much smoking he is allowed to do in the house. None at all. Which is fair, it's her house after all and he has no intention of behaving poorly while he's hear. Not yet anyway.

Rose Anderson isn't a smoker and she often states that Charlie indulging himself in a post-coital smoke is risky behavior. Jean will smell it on his sheet, in his clothes, his hair. He doesn't mind, because then she'd have to talk to him about sex and he knew she wasn't prepared to do that with him. Anyway, it was just one, who minded.

He offered her a drag of it, but she only accepted the first time. After she figured out how it works and actually got the smoke into her lungs, she coughed her guts out. Then she put it out in a glass of water he had on the nightstand, which annoyed him. That was probably the first sign that he willfully ignored. He lit up a second.

3\. Secrets

Everyone has secrets. Things they did. Things they didn't do. Things they wish they'd done. Charlie Davis is not any different in that respect. He has secrets of his own, and the secrets of other people piled on top of that. His mother, his brother, his father, his friends and his lovers all added their secrets to the pot, wondering who he would even tell, should he dare to spill the beans. He can understand that. He's a loner, quiet and unfunny to boot.

His first secret happens at ten when Ray trips their mother down a flight of stairs and Charlie rightly lets her believe that she tripped over her own feet. At eleven, Ray breaks all of their good glasses that were a wedding gift to his parents and Charlie takes the angry beat down from their father. When he overhears Ray talking to the girl he knocked up, he wisely keeps his mouth shut.

Then there are his own secrets. At night, he has dreams about his mate Rob who joins the army and in those dreams, he kisses him and is allowed to give him a handjob. He tries Bennies and uses them every now and then when he sees his friends. The night before he's due to get married, he sleeps with a man for the first time. The night after he's due to be married, he sleeps with a girl who was in the French club with him at school and he hasn't seen since graduation.

He keeps his mother's secrets as well. That whole bottle of wine that's empty the next day, Mr Greg who he never sees again after his father comes home, the little scrapes on the bottom of their car, the jewelry that begins to show up in the window of the pawn store on his way home from school. All of these things he buries inside himself and swears black and blue he won't tell anyone.

He keeps secrets of all of his friends, actually. Ones from Matthew and how he's repulsed by even the idea of sex but would endure it for Alice. Jean's best recipes that win awards and he's not allowed to share under threat of death. The stories that Rose will never publish. The ring Lucien carried around with him all day.

His biggest secret is that he never wanted to be a police officer. He wanted to be a boxer, and he was good at it too. Better than Ray has ever been. He thought he'd make it as a boxer, too. He came home when he was eighteen and a half to find that his mother had packed all his things into suitcases and told him, on no uncertain terms, that he was going to the academy to make his father proud and carry on the family legacy. Charlie is a good kid (one of them has to be) so he takes it in his stride and by the next week, he's enrolled.

4\. Rock and Roll

Growing up, Charlie listened almost exclusively to Church music. The great big out of tune organ that played the background music for their hymns featured prominently among his memories of his youth. He remembered listening to the old beast every Sunday without fail, singing along in Latin to whatever they had been told to sing.

When he turns eleven, he's allowed to keep a radio that only half works in his bedroom and that was his first introduction to the world of music outside of what his mother let him. He liked Big Band, and Swing and in the right mood, Jazz. Opera concerned him, but pop was romantic and upbeat. Unfortunately, he had two left feet and dancing in public was out of the question, but being able to talk about pop acts leant him a small amount of popularity with the pretty girls who he would very much have liked to kiss.

Rock and Roll hits him like a ton of bricks when a local band plays it at the school. Charlie doesn't know a high C from a lower D but he is attracted to it right away. It's upbeat and fun. It's nothing like the Church music his mother enjoys. He loves it right away. He's also a cop in his first few years and it's a little unbecoming to like Rock and Roll while being a cop so he keeps it close to his chest.

Growing up, Charlie never had a record player, he was far too poor to have money to spend on something frivolous like that. Lucien Blake has two and when Charlie tells him about his lack of appreciation for music that wasn't fun, he insists that they listen to Opera together. Charlie hated every second of it, but it gave him a way to listen to other records Lucien has in his possession. In the end, he brought his own record, Elvis Presley, and listened to them when the house was empty. He even did a little bit of dancing.

When his mother found out about his musical tastes, she promptly confiscated his radio and pulled him over her knee like a child. She smacked him with a wooden spoon and he felt every single welt for weeks after. She even broke her spoon on him she used so much force. Ray laughed at him every time that he winced or shifted around in his seat looking for a comfortable position to sit in.

Of course, it goes without saying that when Ray develops a fondness for swing, their mother doesn't even raise an eyebrow, much less a spoon. In fact, she seems happy that he's learning new things. She herself even comes around to Big Band a few years later and the wooden spoon incident just becomes one of those things that they don't talk about anymore.

5\. Danny Parks

People often describe their lovers in flower terms. Comparing their eyes to jewels or their hair to the rays of the sun. Charlie has never been prone to that. Daniel Parks, in Charlie's opinion above average in terms of looks, his face is handsome, but nothing stands out especially. His eyes are green but hardly the colour of emeralds. He is perfectly acceptable.

Their relationship is mutually beneficial, initially. Just a bit of experimentation for the other. Danny's hands are clumsy, he has never been with a man before Charlie. But he's earnest and sweet and entirely unsuited to someone has wayward and bent up as Charlie. It's not some kind of grand love story, there is no fighting for his man or undead wives. Not every story has to be. Love stories are everywhere. Between Charlie and the girl who checked his groceries. Lucien and the patient who smiles at him from under those long eyelashes. Danny and his favourite meal.

The actual sex is no better or worse than it was with Rose. It's acceptable. They are slowly learning how the other works and what they need to do to one another to make it better. Danny is sleeping with Rose too. They're a proper couple, just like Charlie always wanted to be. It upsets him, sure, but they both look so happy with each other that Charlie cannot begin to act on any of his crueler thoughts.

He's seen the ring Danny keeps in his bedside table on one of his made scrambles for a condom. It's heart breaking in a way it has no right to be to know that Danny is going to be with someone else. The unearned jealously of the future drives him to the brink, taking as much from Danny as his arms can hold. A kiss, a hug, another night in bed. Another curse of Roses name, for being able to give him what Charlie never could. Another curse of Danny for shattering all of Charlie's defenses and making him feel like this.

Danny is a vice-like nothing else he's ever known. Paltry metaphors about addiction don't even begin to explain Charlie's desperation and obsession. Charlie likes to smoke, or run or listen to rock and roll, but if he abstains, the worst that happens is mild withdrawal as he detoxes. If he abstains from Danny, he feels like he's burning all over and only one thing can help him, and that's Danny's hands touching him. Allusions to religion, singing him hymns from his knees on the dirty floor of a rundown motel don't even come close to summarising how he feels, even so, he does put that shitty plastic ring Danny won him on the same chain as his St Michael pendant.

Quite against his will, Charlie fell into attachment and obsession with Danny. Broken down into its parts, love is as unattractive as any other thing with its belly exposed. Charlie's the same. He's made from legacy and sin, belly up and soft bits exposed for Danny to do with as he pleases. And Danny? Danny gives him that ring.


End file.
